We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to write about Sutori on their blogs and send links our way during our short closed beta phase.
Next Generation Internet (In Swedish, no less!)
Add comment August 10th, 2006 posted by john
The moment has arrived!
Our beta testers have kicked the tires and given us their feedback.
We’ve smoothed out some wrinkles and added lots of features. And now it’s time to pull back the curtain.
In other words . . .
Closed beta is over. Sutori is now open to the wide world at sutori.com!
Of course, while this is big step, we’ve still got a long way to go. And we need your help to get there:
Add comment August 10th, 2006 posted by john
We’ve been running a “best stories” contest among our beta testers. The five winners, who will all receive a Sutori t-shirt, were judged according to an inevitably subjective combination of:
Please realize that making these selections was very difficult. We love all of our beta testers equally.
But someone’s gotta win, so . . . the tees go to:
missrogue
for
u-Haul u-Suck
fmny
for
Ipoo on Ipod
cherylmin
for
I just want a hot dog at Yankee Stadium
robjuh
for
It’s LYING to you, don’t worry!
and finally . . .
barry
For the most stories by a single user!
Winners will receive an email soon with instructions on collecting their prizes. Once again, thanks to everyone who’s taking part in our closed beta.
We should have an announcement to make soon about the next phase of Sutori’s development, so stay tuned.
Add comment August 8th, 2006 posted by john
We’ve been running the Sutori Beta since late Monday night when we first invited everyone at Blast Radius to join in, and then on Tuesday when we invited those of you kind enough to sign up on our beta list.
Just before we launched, we setup a new email address - hello@sutori.com - for you to send your feedback and to ask to join the mailing list. We even tested it. At least we think we did.
It turns out that it works fine - if you use an internal Blast Radius email address. In our haste to bring you Sutori we didn’t test the email from outside. We were wondering why only our internal Blast people were giving us feedback - we expected that the community as a whole would be the most vocal contributors.
Well, guess what? hello@sutori.com is broken. It don’t work. Baroken. Its. Dead. Jim.
Oops.
If you’ve sent an email to hello@sutori.com, please accept our very very humble apologies. We screwed up and we’re sorry.
We are working on it - hopefully it’s just a DNS issue - and we’ll let you know here as soon as its fixed. In the mean time, if you want to reach us, this blog is always a great way to get in touch, or use our backup address:
sutori@blastradius.com
UPDATE: This is issue is fixed. Hello@sutori.com is now good to go.
1 comment August 3rd, 2006 posted by jordan
Thanks to Tara’s post about her first dip into the Sutori beta pool, we’ve discovered a wee bug: there are some ways to view stories that don’t confirm to the one story, one permalink rule.
This should be changed by tomorrow. In the meantime, keep it in mind if you’re posting or sharing links to specific stories.
UPDATE August 2: This issue has been solved. We now have universal permalinks.
Add comment August 1st, 2006 posted by john
Okay, so somewhere along the road to Sutori-ville, we decided to make tags comma-separated rather than space-separated.
Jordan claims he lobbied for space-separated and was voted down. I honestly don’t remember the conversation but I’m sure he’s right.
So anyhow, we’ve already noticed a few of our super-savvy beta testers instinctively using spaces to separate their tags and ignoring our possibly wrong-headed request for commas.
So what do you think? Is it time to wise up and lose the commas? Leave a comment and let us know.
UPDATE August 4: Tags are no-longer comma-separated - they’re space separated instead!
4 comments August 1st, 2006 posted by john
So those of you who dropped your email address in our sign up form will by now have received invitations to our closed beta.
This is big moment for us, and we’re really looking forward to your feedback.
And of course, we’re looking forward to reading your stories.
The interesting thing about a site like Sutori is that all we’re really creating is the frame. It’s up to you to fill in the picture.
For example, many parts of the site haven’t been switched on for the closed beta because they don’t really mean much until we’ve collected some stories.
So next to feedback, that’s our biggest request for you beta testers: Please help bring Sutori to life by giving it your stories!
Oh, and also please don’t try testing in it Internet Explorer ‘cause it won’t look too good. Firefox and Safari are good to go, though.
Finally, if you never got around to dropping us your email address but you’re interested in taking a look behind the curtain, leave a comment on this post or email us at hello@sutori.com.
1 comment August 1st, 2006 posted by john
It’s coming - we promise! We’re about to start our own closed internal Alpha here at Blast this week, and we will very shortly be starting a closed external one. If you’re interested in participating, head over to www.sutori.com and sign up. We will be handing out invites for the closed beta to people on that list. If you don’t sign up, you’ll have to wait for the open beta like the rest of the world!
Add comment July 25th, 2006 posted by jordan
Things have been a wee bit quiet on the Sutori blog lately as we’ve all been heads down trying to build or little labor of love.
I thought I would break the silence today by posting a sample story based on a personal experience. On a scale of 1-10, this one would have a goodwill rating of about 7, because even though I’m griping a bit, I still loves me some Adidas.
To me, this apparent contradiction illustrates something important about what we’re trying to do with Sutori. Like most relationships, the one between customers and businesses is not as simple as simple as love or hate, black or white. It’s more complicated than that. There are always shades of grey. There’s always context. There’s always a story.
So here’s one of mine:
I love Adidas . . . but this is not a love story.
Ever since I was a kid, the three stripes have made me happy. They have a certain iconic appeal that is seared into my consciousness. A sort of timeless beauty.
Because I fell under the Adidas spell as a kid in the seventies and eighties, I especially love retro-style Adidas. These days I think they call them “Adidas originals”.
So you can imagine how pleased I was when they opened a store in Vancouver (where I live) dedicated entirely to Adidas Originals. I discovered the store while walking past one day and a half hour later I walked out with a pair of shoes. A beautifully ugly pair of tennis shoes call Forest Hills.
I was a happy man.
But a few weeks later, I was less happy. The first problem was the holes. Turns out that when they were released in the early eighties Forest Hills were considered very innovative. First, they are extremely light. Sounds great so far. But they were also designed so that the feet of the tennis player wearing them woudl be cool and ventilated. To accomplish this, they basically put holes in the bottom of the shoes.
This makes perfect sense if you are playing tennis on a hot day. But a little less sense if you are walking around very rainy city like Vancouver. No one at the store told me about these holes when I bought the shoes.
Not a great start.,
But I was still happy. A little duct tape inside the toes and voila! No more soggy socks.
But then came the matter of the glue. There is a strip of suede across each toe of the shoe. And within 2 weeks of my purchase these strips started to come loose as the apparently cheap glue holding them on lost its stickiness.
That’s when my adventures in shoe repair began. A few months, a few experiments and a new glue collection later, I’ve finally arrived at a workable method to patch them up when the glue starts to give out. It involves a tube of crazy glue, a roll of packing tape and, most importantly, a whole lot of forgiveness for the “mark of the three stripes”.
So why should Adidas care?
After decades of loyalty, I tried on a pair of Pumas just last week.
1 comment July 14th, 2006 posted by john
I’ve written a few times about the “goodwill slider” that will allow you to quickly sum up the level of goodwill encapsulated in each story you post on Sutori.
Here, again, is a rough mock of what the slider will look like.
Along the way from angry read to happy orange, we’ve now determined that there will be 16 possible moods. Just for fun, here’s what we’re calling them, from best to worst:
Keep in mind that these are just the starting point. Each story’s goodwill scores will also be impacted by the number of users who agree or disagree with it.
1 comment June 12th, 2006 posted by john